One World, One Health

Send us a text [https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/1961832/open_sms] Zombie movies may score at the box office and shows about dangerous contagions including “The Last of Us” may be a hit on streaming services, but preparedness for disasters is no winner for American politicians.  Every recent U.S. presidential administration has dismantled the pandemic plan [https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-virus-outbreak-barack-obama-public-health-ce014d94b64e98b7203b873e56f80e9a] put together by the previous one, notes Dr. Asha M. George, Executive Director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense [https://biodefensecommission.us10.list-manage.com/track/click?u=4c470782d7daabc6a86359639&id=c5f7b9cc82&e=230661c308]. However, the cuts being made [https://onehealthtrust.org/news-media/podcasts/cuts-tariffs-and-tightening-borders-trumps-united-states-and-global-health/] by the new Trump administration to the United States biodefense budget are going deeper than ever before. Global efforts to track diseases including Ebola virus and avian influenza have ended [https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-cuts-damage-global-efforts-track-diseases-prevent-outbreaks].  Among the latest to fall under the axe: the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC), a federal advisory body to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) [https://globalbiodefense.com/tag/us-cdc-centers-for-disease-control/], which had helped shape national infection prevention guidelines [https://globalbiodefense.com/2025/05/07/the-disbanding-of-hicpac-is-part-of-a-larger-dangerous-pattern-of-undermining-health-protections/] meant to keep hospitals safe and contain outbreaks.  The loss of the U.S. Agency for International Development [https://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/03/28/g-s1-56968/usaid-terminates-nearly-all-its-remaining-employees], USAID, has already begun devastating not only global health efforts, but also U.S. national security efforts, multiple experts say. [https://magazine.publichealth.jhu.edu/2025/the-cost-to-global-health]  And things were not in a good place to begin with, says George. “The biodefense community is in for the fight of its life to get the funding it needs,” she said in her latest report [https://biodefensecommission.org/the-state-of-u-s-biodefense-written-remarks-by-dr-asha-m-george/] on biodefense. “It was starving before. It is going to be anorexic soon.”  Listen as George explains to One World, One Health host Maggie Fox just what’s at risk for the world if the United States doesn’t start paying attention to biodefense.

Send us a text [https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/1961832/open_sms] The scene on the beach was horrific. Thousands of mothers and baby elephant seals lay in the sand, taken out by a deadly virus. Dr. Marcela Uhart and her colleagues were shocked by what they found [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53766-5] after the H5N1 avian influenza virus swept through a colony of elephant seals on the coast of Argentina’s far south Patagonia region. More than 17,000 of the animals had died, their bodies ravaged by the virus. H5N1 bird flu [https://www.cdc.gov/bird-flu/situation-summary/index.html] has swept around the world, destroying poultry flocks [https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/updated-joint-fao-who-woah-public-health-assessment-of-recent-influenza-a(h5)-virus-events-in-animals-and-people_apr2025] and wildlife. Like other influenza viruses, it mutates constantly and swaps genetic material in a process called reassortment. It can now infect not just birds, but livestock such as cattle [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq0900] and sheep as well as mink, pet cats, sea lions, and human beings [https://bnonews.com/index.php/2025/03/3-year-old-child-dies-from-h5n1-bird-flu-in-cambodia/]. It has devastated egg production [https://caes.ucdavis.edu/news/bird-flus-varied-impacts-egg-and-milk-markets] and threatens dairy operations. The biggest fear is that it will acquire both the ability to spread from human to human and maintain its most deadly qualities. An H5N1 pandemic [https://www.who.int/teams/global-influenza-programme/avian-influenza/avian-a-h5n1-virus] has the potential to be much, much worse than Covid-19 was. People can’t be ready for the virus unless the world keeps an eye on it. That’s what Uhart [https://ohi.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/people/marcela-uhart], who is Director of the Latin America Program [https://whc.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/latin-america-program] at the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the University of California, Davis, is trying to do [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dREDw8ATiyA]. That’s why her team studied the bodies of the dead elephant seals and other animals killed by the virus. “Mammal-to-mammal transmission could be a stepping-stone in the evolutionary pathway for these viruses to become capable of human-to-human transmission,” they wrote in their report [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53766-5], published in the journal Nature. “What we can learn from what happens in wildlife is crucial,” Uhart says. “That is where these viruses evolve.” Listen as Uhart chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about what her team discovered in Patagonia and what it might mean for every animal on the planet, including  humans. And listen to our other podcast episodes [https://onehealthtrust.org/news-media/podcasts/whats-surprising-and-scary-about-avian-influenza-right-now/] looking at H5N1 bird flu [https://onehealthtrust.org/news-media/podcasts/watching-out-for-the-ever-changing-bird-flu/] and how we should be preparing for the next pandemic. [https://onehealthtrust.org/news-media/podcasts/preventing-pandemics/]

Send us a text [https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/1961832/open_sms] Plastic is everywhere [https://oceanconservancy.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Microplastics-Fact-Sheet-FINAL-2.3.23.pdf]. So are drug-resistant microbes [https://www.who.int/health-topics/antimicrobial-resistance]. What happens when the two team up? A raft of new studies show that bacteria can grow well on plastics, especially on microplastics. Other studies show just how widespread [https://magazine.hms.harvard.edu/articles/microplastics-everywhere] microplastics are – they are found in every ocean and sea tested so far. The most startling studies show these tiny bits of plastics can also build up [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/plastic-human-brains-microplastics] in the human body, including in the liver and brain. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1] Science is done piece by piece, study by study, with no single study painting the whole picture. Now a team at Boston University has added one piece to the puzzle, with a study demonstrating [https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/aem.02282-24] that drug-resistant bacteria grow well on microplastics. Neila Gross, a PhD candidate at BU, helped lead the research. Her team confirmed that E. coli bacteria form mats known as biofilms [https://www.cell.com/trends/microbiology/fulltext/S0966-842X(20)30190-6?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0966842X20301906%3Fshowall%3Dtrue] especially well on microplastics. The team found that antibiotic-resistant bacteria grew better when they were grown on microplastics. This raises a specter of billions of tiny pieces of plastic spreading [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9920460/] drug-resistant bacteria around the world and being ingested and breathed in by animals from shellfish to marine mammals and, likely, people. Listen as Neila chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about how this happens and what it might mean for the spread of antimicrobial resistance.

Send us a text [https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/1961832/open_sms] It’s been a dire year for global health. Almost as soon as he took office as president of the United States, Donald Trump said he would withdraw [https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/withdrawing-the-united-states-from-the-worldhealth-organization/] the country from membership in the World Health Organization (WHO), he fired almost everyone at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and slashed staffing [https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/27/top-usaid-career-staff-ordered-leave-00200854] and budgets at U.S. health agencies such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The United States government also says it plans to end funding [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/health/usaid-cuts-gavi-bird-flu.html] for Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and has cut some funding [https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/us-restores-urgent-food-aid-afghanistan-yemen-millions-120629524] for the United Nations World Food Program's efforts to feed millions of people in 14 countries. Before Trump, the United States was the largest donor to global health [https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/issue-brief/10-things-to-know-about-u-s-funding-for-global-health/] in the world, contributing about US$12 billion in funding. That’s less than 1 percent of the United States federal budget. But the new administration claimed these efforts were wasteful, did not serve the country's interests, and cost too much. [https://www.state.gov/on-delivering-an-america-first-foreign-assistance-program/]  It’s not clear who can or will fill the gaps. [https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/22/health/usaid-who-trump-china.html] “I think we are going through a very dark time,” says Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan [https://onehealthtrust.org/researchers/ramanan_laxminarayan/], founder and president of the One Health Trust. But Dr. Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and economist, does see some hope. He doubts the United States will permanently end its robust support of global health and he sees opportunities for organizations such as WHO to streamline and become more efficient. Listen as he chats with One World, One Health host Maggie Fox about the immediate effects of the startling new United States government policies and how he sees things shaking out in the long term.

Send us a text [https://www.buzzsprout.com/twilio/text_messages/1961832/open_sms] Air pollution is a big killer. Air pollution of all kinds helped kill 4.2 million people globally in 2019, according to the World Health Organization. It can damage nearly every organ [https://www.who.int/teams/environment-climate-change-and-health/air-quality-energy-and-health/health-impacts] in the body, worsening asthma and leading to cancer and heart disease. It especially affects pregnant women and can damage a growing fetus. Air pollution also has more insidious effects. Dr. Álvaro Hofflinger of Arizona State University and colleagues studied school children [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11111-024-00472-5] in a part of Chile where many people still rely on wood-burning stoves. They found the more air pollution children were exposed to, the lower their grades. It’s another piece of evidence that can help parents, policymakers, officials, and health experts make decisions about where to focus their efforts in reducing pollution.  In this episode of One World, One Health, host Maggie Fox chats with Dr. Hofflinger about what his team found, about the factors that cause this type of pollution, and what people might be able to do about it. They found it’s not going to be such an easy problem to solve. Wood is cheap or free for many in parts of Chile, and electricity isn’t. Old habits are hard to break. And clean energy is not always an uncomplicated choice for governments.   Give it a listen and check out some of our other episodes on air pollution and health. Learn from Dr. Sarah Chambliss [https://onehealthtrust.org/news-media/podcasts/hazardous-air-in-the-neighborhood-local-pollution-and-asthma] about how people of color and in low resource neighborhoods are disproportionately affected by poor health due to pollution. Find out about the association between air pollution, depression, and pregnancy in our episode with Dr. Jun Wu [https://onehealthtrust.org/news-media/podcasts/air-pollution-depression-and-pregnancy/].